The Way America Wages War Now (Even After This Guy)

Okay, can we all settle down a little bit, please? There will be no airstrikes into Bahrain. No drone is going to be firing Hellfires up the keister of our plucky ally, Hasan bi Isa al Khalifa, no matter how reckless he may be in dispensing the bullets we sold him. There's an opening for the next Hitler, but there are very few convenient candidates any more. Everybody chill, and that includes the press corps dipshit who shouted at the president's back as he was leaving the Rose Garden today, "Does this vindicate the doctrine of leading from behind?"

Didn't know that was a doctrine. I thought it was called "multilateralism." Anyway, well done, veteran scribe. You got your voice on the teevee.

Unlike my blog buddy Thomas P.M. Barnett, who wrote about all this here in the morning I'm not overly sanguine about all the blessings of Great Power maneuvering among the lesser orders. Empires make me nervous. Imperial policies — even the gentler ones, even the purely commercial ones, even by proxy, and even when they result in the death of one of the few indisputable madmen on the modern scene — make my skin itch. (It's the Irish in me.) As to the blessings of globalization in Africa, well, that continent has been globalized out of most of its wealth and more than a few of its people since long before people invented the hedge fund. Will they do better under Goldman Sachs than they did under the Belgians? (The Nigerian precedent is not encouraging.) Free trade is not democracy, and the latter is in no way an inevitable consequence of the former. I don't see the arrival of consumer goods and/or the modern financial markets as doing much for the average Ugandan. If the local warlord is prevented from killing him because some guy in the international rare-earths trade thinks its bad for business, I guess that's a plus, but I wouldn't count on that the average Ugandan, or the average Libyan, becoming one of Tom Friedman's cab drivers any time soon.

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Beyond that, there is something very chilly and soi-disant about the way we're waging wars these days. It is good that there were no American boots on the ground in Libya, but there were American airplanes and American ordinance. It is good that we're a bit more modest about our role in NATO. (Whether there still needs to be a NATO is another question entirely.) But the president persisted in his short address today on drawing a distinction between the Libyan people, for whom our ordinance was protection, and the Libyan opposition forces, as though all our firepower was dedicated to the first (and more noble) task and had little or nothing to do with the second. The way we protected the civilians was by lining up our military might on one side of a civil war. It does us no good to pretend otherwise, or to make the absurd distinction between our humanitarian ends and the violence means with which we attained them. We had enough of "freedom bombs" with the last guy, thanks.

With two major and bloody exceptions, we fought our Cold War battles the way Rome did, through proxies at the edges of our "sphere of influence." (One thing about the Cold War, it made for great turns of phrase. The Soviets had a "bloc." We had a "sphere of influence.") Now, we don't even do that. Iraq and Afghanistan aside, we fight our wars by automation, hurling thunderbolts from beyond the horizon, like Jove. There's something scarifying about that, especially when it's aimed at an American citizen, and it kills his teenage son, and the people who threw the thunderbolts don't even try to show us why these people had to die. For a long time, we had people who said that the reason we were sending the Army all over the world was because there wasn't any draft. One of the most apt criticisms of the "war on terror" was that it was being conducted without engaging the entire country in the effort. Now, not only is the combat removed from the citizenry, it's increasingly removed from soldiers. Some guy at a console in Kansas City is making war on Pakistan. That makes me nervous.

It's going to be fascinating to watch the president as he goes forward. Given what's going on with any attempt he makes to solve the domestic economic crisis, he may have to run as a war president who gets things done. (Call him feckless again, Newt. I dare you.) As to the late Col. Ghadafi, well, Satchmo had most of the right of it.

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